The asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the mid-nineteenth century consolidation of psychiatry

Abstract

What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be was of considerable significance in the history of lunacy reform in Britain. It contains perhaps the single most influential portrait by a medical author of the horrors of the traditional madhouse system. Its description of the contrasting virtues of the reformed asylum, a hive of therapeutic activity under the benevolent but autocratic guidance and control of its medical superintendent, provided within a brief compass, a strikingly attractive alternative vision of an apparently attainable utopia. Browne's book thus provided an impetus to the efforts then under way to make the provision of county asylums compulsory, and towards the institution of a national system of asylum inspection and supervision. This edition contains an introductory essay by Andrew Scull. Scull discusses the social context within which What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be came to be written, examines the impact of the book on the progress of lunancy reform, and places its author's career in the larger framework of the development of Victorian psychiatry as an organized profession. Through an examination of Browne's tenure as Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Asylum in Dumfries, Scull then compares the theory and practice of asylum care in the moral treatment era, revealing the remorseless processes through which such philanthropic foundations degenertaed into more or less well-trained cemeteries for the still-breathing - institutions almost startingly remote from Browne's earlier visions of what they ought to be.